Since I have just read that "the intelligentsia" is usually now used to refer to artists etc. and doesn't often include scientists, this isn't as bad as I first thought; but still, it seems pretty silly to me - trying to appear deep by turning our expectations on their head. A common trick, and sometimes it can be used to make a good point... but what's the point being made here? Ordinary people are more rational than those engaged in intellectual pursuits? I doubt that, though rationality is in short supply in either category; but in any case, we know the "ordinary man" is extremely foolish in his beliefs.

Folk wisdom and common sense are a favored refuge of those who like to mock those foolish, Godless int'lectual types, and that's what this reminds me of; you know, the entirely too-common trope of the supposedly intelligent scientist or other educated person being shown up by the homespun wisdom and plain sense of Joe Ordinary. (Not to accuse Orwell of being anti-intellectual in general - I just don't like this particular quote.)

but still, it seems pretty silly to me - trying to appear deep by turning our expectations on their head.

This quote isn't just about seeming deep, it refers to a frequently observed phenomenon. I think two main reasons for it are that intellectuals are better at rationalizing beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons (there is even a theory that some intellectuals signal their intelligence by rationalizing absurd beliefs) and the fact that they're frequently in ivory towers where day to day reality is less available.

I remember Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment suggested a different mechanism for intelligence to be self-defeating: clever arguing. In a forecaster's field of expertise, they have more material with which to justify unreasonable positions and refute reasonable ones, and therefore they are more able to resist the force of reality.

In truth we know that the wind is its blowing. Similarly the stream is the running of water. And so, too, I am what I am doing. I am not an agent but a hive of activity. If you were to lift off the lid, you would find something more like a compost heap than the kind of architectural structure that anatomists and psychologists like to imagine.

I love it! How about in response:
Since blight and spite can make might, its just not polite by citing might to assume that there's right, the probabilities fight between spite, blight and right so might given blight and might given spite must be subtracted from causes for might if the order's not right!

quintopia: i made jan 1 be Hypothesis Day. instead of making resolutions, you make hypotheses that you want resolved by the end of the year and write them down so you can evaluate them at the end of the year

No, it says that practical degrees of excellence are just fine and you don't actually have to achieve philosophically perfect excellence to be sufficiently effective.

It's the difference between not being able to solve an NP-complete problem perfectly, and being able to come up with pretty darn close numerical approximations that do the practical job just fine. (I think evolution achieves a lot of the latter, for example.)

Certainly. The idea is that God was invented not just to explain the world (the standard answer to that question) but also as a sort of model of how a particular group of people wanted to be governed. One of the theses of the game is that governments constitute a system for (attempting to) compensate for the inability of people to rationally govern themselves, and that God is the ultimate realization of that attempt. A perfect government with a perfect understanding of human nature and access to everyone's opinions and desires (but without any actual humans involved). Over time, of course, views of what 'God' should be like shift with the ambient culture.

I agree, with the caveat that humans usually (and probably in this case) do things for multiple complicated reasons rather than just one. Also the caveat that Deus Ex is a video game.

Interesting theory, and perhaps one that's got legs, but there's some self-reinforcement going on in the religious sphere that keeps it from being unicausal -- if we've got a religion whose vision of God (or of a god of rulership like Odin or Jupiter, or of a divine hierarchy) is initially a simple reflection of how its members want to be governed, I'd nonetheless expect that to drift over time to variants which are more memorable or more flattering to adherents or more conducive to ingroup cohesion, not just to those which reflect changing mores of rulership. Then group identity effects will push those changes into adherents' models of proper rulership, and a nice little feedback loop takes shape.

This probably helps explain some of the more blatantly maladaptive aspects of religious law we know about, although I imagine costly signaling plays an important role too.

If a sufficient number of people who wanted to stop war really did gather together, they would first of all begin by making war upon those who disagreed with them. And it is still more certain that they would make war on people who also want to stop wars but in another way.
-G.I. Gurdjieff

I dont think the idea is that anyone who wants to stop war is stupid ... its that anyone who thinks war is necessary clearly does not see that the diversity of viewpoints exists and that others viewpoints are just as valid as theirs (as hard as it may be to understand) and deserves respect.

In most cases where unnecessary violence has occurred, the suppression of individual freedom and loss / harm of human life has always been justified in an effort to end the conflict of one viewpoint and it's antithesis.

The blind spot of the oppressor will always be that their "oppressing" of others is justified for the viewpoint of their subjective view of "greater" good and not the good of all people, as they all would objectively see it.

I dont think the idea is that anyone who wants to stop war is stupid ... its that anyone who thinks war is necessary clearly does not see that the diversity of viewpoints exists and that others viewpoints are just as valid as theirs (as hard as it may be to understand) and deserves respect.

I do not think that is what Gurdjieff meant. The idea that all viewpoints are valid could hardly be more alien to his system. From my reading of Gurdjieff, I take him to be speaking here of the mechanical nature of the ordinary man, who imagines himself to be thinking and acting, an idea contradicted as soon as one observes him in his life.

Running any enterprise the size of Google or Goldman Sachs requires trading off many competing factors. To make the tradeoff, someone has to keep all that information in their head at once. There's no other way to balance competing demands; if you keep only part of the information in your head, your decision will be biased towards the part that you've loaded into your brain. If you try to spread decision making across multiple people, the decisions will be biased towards the part that the person who screams the loudest can hold in his head (which is usually a smaller subset than optimal; it takes mental effort to scream loudly).

Unfortunately, for every rational action, there appears to be an equal and opposite irrational one: did you see bhousel's response?

Rationality is emotionless and mechanical. It's about making a reasonable decision based on whatever information is available to you. However, rational decisions do not involve morals, culture, or feelings. This is exactly what companies like Google and Goldman Sachs are being criticized for. [...] If I look down into my wallet and see no money there, and I'm hungry for lunch, and I decide to steal some money from a little old lady, that may be a perfectly rational decision to make. An outside observer may say I'm being evil, but they don't have a complete information picture about how hungry I am, or how long the line at the ATM is, or that everyone else is eating lunch so I have a duty to my shareholders to do the same.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

To a Frenchman like M. Renan, intelligence does not mean a quickness of wit, a ready dexterity in handling ideas, or even a ready accessibility to ideas. It implies those, of course, but it does not mean them; and one should perhaps say in passing that it does not mean the pert and ignorant cleverness that current vulgar usage has associated with the word. Again it is our common day-to-day experience that gives us the best possible assistance in establishing the necessary differentiations. We have all seen men who were quick witted, accessible to ideas and handy with their management of them, whom we should yet hesitate to call intelligent; we are conscious that the term does not quite fit. The word sends us back to a phrase of Plato. The person of intelligence is the one who always tends to "see things as they are," the one who never permits his view of them to be directed by convention, by the hope of advantage, or by an irrational and arbitrary authoritarianism. He allows the current of his consciousness to flow in perfect freedom over any object that may be presented to it, uncontrolled by prejudice, prepossession or formula; and thus we may say that there are certain integrities at the root of intelligence which give it somewhat the aspect of a moral as well as an intellectual attribute.

The important thing, I take it, is to decide the level of our contribution on your own, without doing any detailed gathering of data or modeling.
-- LeoChopper, at sluggy.net, summarizing an argument against AGW.

(Okay, I understand it sitting at 0. Downvoted for what? Putting modeling on the same footing as detailed gathering of data?)

I'm not the one who downvoted it, but I'm about to add another, because the quote makes little to no sense without context. Who is "our" and "your"? Does "contribution" refer to CO2 emissions, or to poltiical activism, or to planning work, or to research?

People also tend to downvote pro- and anti-AGW arguments here as "mindkilling", but this one hasn't even reached that point yet. From just the quoted text I can't even be certain whether this is an anti-AGW statement (climate modelling is insufficiently detailed and data is too sparse to justify economic contributions to mitigating global warming!) or a pro-AGW sarcastic summary of an anti-AGW argument (you're ignoring our detailed data and modeling and just deciding how much CO2 we should contribute to the air!) or something I've missed entirely.

I see. It was the latter - someone had just pooh-poohed basically all climate science, explicitly citing gut feeling. The above was a very straightforward summary of the 'argument', not really sarcastic.

Some environments are worse than irregular. Robin Hogarth described "wicked" environments, in which professionals are likely to learn the wrong lessons from experience. He borrows from Lewis Thomas the example of a physician in the early twentieth century who often had intuitions about patients who were about to develop typhoid. Unfortunately, he tested his hunch by palpating the patient's tongue, without washing his hands between patients. When patient after patient became ill, the physician developed a sense of clinical infallibility. His predictions were accurate--but not because he was exercising professional intuition!

The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.

This quote is itself an example of the phenomenon it describes since it stems from a desire to be able to separate true from false science without the hard and messy process of looking at the territory.

The problem is that it's still false. A lot of false science was developed by people honestly trying to find true causes. I also suspect that a good deal of actual science was developed by people who accepted a cause without enough evidence out of a desire to have a cause for everything and got lucky.

"Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!"

"The what?" said Richard.

"The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ..."

"Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity."

"Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered." ...

"You see?" he said dropping his cigarette butt, "They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see."

Every subjective feeling IS at least one thing - a bunch of neurons firing. Whether stored representational content activated in that firing has any connection to events represented happening outside the brain is another question.

Now let's talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact, one of the economists who won--he shared a Nobel Prize--and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn't quite as efficient as you think, he said, "Well, it's a two-sigma event." And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas--better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. [Laughter] And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.

I'm surprised by how consistently misinterpreted the EMH is, even by people with the widest possible perspective on markets and economics. The EMH practically requires that some people make money by trading, because that's the mechanism which causes the market to become efficient. The EMH should really be understood to mean that as more and more money is leached out of the market by speculators, prices become better and better approximations to real net present values.

I've always thought of the Efficient Market Hypothesis as the anti-Tinkerbell: if everybody all starts clapping and believing in it, it dies.

See, for example, every bubble ever. "We don't need to worry about buying that thing for more than it seems to be worth, because prices are going up so we can always resell it for even more than that later!"

See, for example, every bubble ever. "We don't need to worry about buying that thing for more than it seems to be worth, because prices are going up so we can always resell it for even more than that later!"

If they actually believed the market they were trading in was efficient they wouldn't believe that prices would continue to go up. They would expect them to follow the value of capital invested at that level of risk. Further - as applicable to any bubble that doesn't represent overinvestment in the entire stockmarket over all industries - they wouldn't jump on a given stock or group of stocks more than any other. They would buy random stocks from the market, probably distributed as widely as possible.

No, belief in an efficient market can only be used as a scapegoat here, not as a credible cause.

-So what do you think happens after we die?
-The acids and lifeforms living inside your body eat their way out, while local detritivores eat their way in. Why?
-No, no, no, what happens to you?
-Oh, you guys mean the soul.
-Exactly.
-Is that in the body?
-Yes!
-The acids and lifeforms eat their way out, while local detritivores eat their way in.

Well, in this case the universal wavefunction does factorise into a product of two functions 𝛙(light cone)𝛙(cat), where 𝛙(cat) has an "alive" branch and "dead" branch, but 𝛙(light cone) does not. I'd rather identify with 𝛙(light cone) than 𝛙(light cone × cat) [i.e. 𝛙(universe)], but whatever.

I just threw Schrodinger's cat outside the future light cone. In your Everett branch is the cat alive or dead?

It seems to me that asking about the state of something in "your" Everett branch while it's outside your light cone is rather meaningless. The question doesn't really make sense. Someone with a detailed knowledge of physics in this situation can predict what an observer anywhere will observe.

But in general, your point is correct. We do have a very hard time trying to learn about events outside our light cone, etc. But the message in the quote is simply the idea that an uncertain map != an uncertain territory.

The question doesn't really make sense. Someone with a detailed knowledge of physics in this situation can predict what an observer anywhere will observe.

No they can't. They most certainly can't predict what the observer that is right next to the damn box with the cat in it will observe when it opens the box. In fact, they can't even predict what all observers anywhere in my future light cone will observe (just those observations that could ever be sent back to me).

It seems to me that asking about the state of something in "your" Everett branch while it's outside your light cone is rather meaningless. The question doesn't really make sense. Someone with a detailed knowledge of physics in this situation can predict what an observer anywhere will observe.

So, if it was someone you care about instead of a cat, would you prefer that this happened or that they disappeared entirely?

It is still not meaningful from a physical standpoint. If you were to throw something I valued outside my future lightcone, then I would take the same as you destroying said thing.

And may I remind you that Schrödingers cat was proposed as a thought experimental counter argument to the copenhagen inteprentation, so asking if it is alive or dead before I have had particle interaction with it is equally meaningless, because it has yet to decohere.

Yes it is. Physics doesn't revolve around you. The fact that you can't influence or observe something is a limitation in you, not in physics. Stuff keeps existing when you can't see it.

If you were to throw something I valued outside my future lightcone, then I would take the same as you destroying said thing.

I don't believe you. I would bet that if actually given the choice between someone you loved being sent outside your future lightcone then destroyed or just sent outside the future lightcone and given delicious cookies then you would prefer them to be given the far-away cookies than the far away destruction.

Yes, of course I believe in the implied invisible. But from a personal standpoint It does not matter because the repercussions are the same either way, unless you can use your magical "throw stuff outside my future lightcone" powers to bring them back. Outside f-lightcone = I can never interact with it.

And if I have to be really nitpicky, current macroscopic physcis does revolve around the observer, but certain things can be agreed upon; such as the hamiltonian, timelike, spacelike and lightlike distances, etc.
Saying physics does not revolve aroud me implies that there is a common reference point, which there isn't.

But even as light is opposed by darkness, science and reason have their enemies. Superstition and belief in magic are as old as man himself; for the intransigence of facts and our limitations in controlling them can be powerfully hard to take. Add to this the reflection that we are in an age when it is popular to distrust whatever is seen as the established view or the Establishment, and it is no wonder that anti-rational attitudes and doctrines are mustering so much support. Still, we can understand what encourages the anti-rationalist turn without losing our zeal for opposing it. A current Continuing Education catalogue offers a course description, under the heading "Philosophy", that typifies the dark view at its darkest: "Children of science that we are, we have based our cultural patterns on logic, on the cognitive, on the verifiable. But more and more there has crept into current research and study the haunting suggestion that there are other kinds of knowledge unfathomable by our cognition, other ways of knowing beyond the limits of our logic, which are deserving of our serious attention." Now "knowledge unfathomable by our cognition" is simply incoherent, as attention to the words makes clear. Moreover, all that creeps is not gold. One wonders how many students enrolled.

“It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.”

― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

I interpret this to mean that often times questions are overlooked because the possibility of them being true seems absurd. Similar to the Sherlock Holmes saying, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

From a slightly different perspective we could say that asking 'silly' questions (even good silly questions) costs status while asking stupid questions can potentially gain status in those cases where the people who hear you ask are themselves stupid (or otherwise incentivised to appreciate a given stupid gesture).

Personally, I think Robin Hanson tends to treat status as a hammer that turns all issues into nails; it's certainly possible to overuse a perspective for analyzing social interaction. But that doesn't mean that there aren't cases where you can only get a meaningful picture of social actions by taking it into consideration.

I think we need to find out what we mean by stupid and sensible questions.

Of course one should in any given situation perform the experiments (ask questions) that gives highes expected information (largest number of bits) yield, I.E. ask if it is a vertebrae before you ask if it is a dog. What I think we disagree upon is the nature of a stupid question.

And now, it seems I cannot come up with a good definition of a stupid question as anything I previously would refer to as a "stupid question" can be equally reduced to humility.

Hrm. Okay, I see your point, I think. I think there's some benefit in devoting a small portion of your efforts to pursuing outlying hypotheses. Probably proportional to the chance of them being true, I guess, depending on how divisible the resources are.
If by "stupid", Doctorow means "basic", he might be talking about overlooked issues everyone assumed had already been addressed. But I guess probabilistically that's the same thing - its unlikely after a certain amount of effort that basic issues haven't been addressed, so its an outlying hypothesis, and should again get approximately as much attention as its likelihood of being true, depending on resources and how neatly they can be divided up. And maybe let the unlikely things bubble up in importance if the previously-thought-more-likely things shrink due to apparently conflicting evidence...
A glaring example to me seems the abrahamic god's nonexplanatory abilities going unquestioned for as long as they did. Like, treating god as a box to throw unexplained things in and then hiding god behind "mysteriousness" begs the question of why there's a god clouded in mysteriousness hanging around.

Seems fair. The Holmes saying seems a bit funny to me now that I think about it, because the probability of an unlikely event changes to become more likely when you've shown that reality appears constrained from the alternatives. I mean, I guess that's what he's trying to convey in his own way. But, by the definition of probability, the likelihood of the improbable event increases as constraints appear preventing the other possibilities. You're going from P(A) to P(A|B) to P(A|(B&C)) to.. etc. You shouldn't be simultaneously aware that an event is improbable and seeing that no other alternative is true at the same time, unless you're being informed of the probability, given the constraints, by someone else, which means that yes, they appear to be considering more candidate possibilities (or their estimate was incorrect. Or something I haven't thought of...).

Darwin is saying that all animals are linked by genealogical ties. The mouse and the elephant share a common ancestor, a small, shrew-like creature, 200million years ago. So is he saying elephants are still mice, just big mice with a funny nose? No, the theory, as the book title suggests, is a theory of origins. Given 10million years descent with modification can come up with something genuinely new. By spreading the necessary changes across millions of generations, descent with modification can even produce genuine novelty without needing a mouse to give birth to an elephant.

Some people look at modern technological civilization and see it as evidence that humans are not apes, but are their own kind of thing, genuinely new. Darwinians accept that sufficient such evidence can prove the point that humans (or maybe post-humans) are not apes, because it is central to Darwin's theory that some kinds of genuine novelty arise despite (and indeed through) long chains of descent.

There would be no point in defining fish monophyletically anyway, as it would then be just a synonym of craniates. (Also note that “apes, i.e. non-human hominoids, do not include humans” is a tautology but “fish, i.e. non-tetrapod craniates, do not include humans” is not.)

(Of course, you could then say “There would be no point in defining apes monophyletically anyway, as it would then be just a synonym of hominoids.” But hominoids is a much uglier word, and hominoids/hominids/hominines/etc. are much harder to remember than apes/great apes/African apes/etc. (plus, my spell checker baulks at some of the former, FWIW). (See this proposal to rename the scientific names of the clades.)

The fish thing is irrelevant. If what makes bonobos and orangutans apes is that they share a common ancestor, then that also makes us an ape, since that's our ancestor too. Can't adapt that argument to fish, because descendants of the ancestor we share with fish are not generally called fish, the way descendants of the ancestor we share with orangutans are generally called apes.

Can't adapt that argument to fish, because descendants of the ancestor we share with fish are not generally called fish, the way descendants of the ancestor we share with orangutans are generally called apes.

I'm not sure this holds water: a common-ancestry approach would have to take in lobe-finned fishes like the lungfish, who're more closely related to tetrapods but are called fish on the basis of a morphological similarity derived from a common ancestor. Essentially the same process as for apes. They're in good company, though: there are plenty of traditional taxonomical groups which turn out to be polyphyletic when you take a cladistic approach, including reptiles.

Human civilizations are extremely complicated, and defy current attempts to understand them. One indirect approach is to leave humans to one side for the moment and to study bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas first. Where does that get us? There are two competing ideas.

ONE The huge differences between modern human civilizations and the social behaviour of bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, are a reflection of recent evolution. In the past few million years, since the last common ancestor, human evolution has taken some strange turns, leading to the advanced technological society we see around us. When we study bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas we are looking at creatures without key adaptions and when we try to transfer insights to help us understand human social behaviour we end up mislead.

TWO Once we understand bonobos, chimpanzee, and gorilla behaviour, we have the key to understanding all apes, including humans. Human civilisation may be incomprehensible when we come at it cold, but having warmed up on puzzling out the basis of the simpler social behaviours of other apes, we can expect to start making progress.

Which of these two views is correct? That strikes me as a very hard question. I'm uncomfortable with the words "humans are still apes" because that phrase seems to be used to beg the question. The more conservative formulation "humans and apes had a common ancestor a few million years ago." dodges giving a premature opinion on a hard question.

Here is a thought experiment to dramatize the issue: A deadly virus escapes from a weapons lab and kills all humans. Now the talking-animal niche on earth is vacant again. Will chimpanzees or gorillas evolve to fill it, building their own technologically advanced civilizations in a few million years time. If you believe view number two, this seems reasonably likely. If you believe view number one, it seems very unlikely. One is much more interested in the idea that the strange turns in human evolution in the past million years are a one in a million freak and are a candidate for the great filter

Which of these two views is correct? That strikes me as a very hard question. I'm uncomfortable with the words "humans are still apes" because that phrase seems to be used to beg the question. The more conservative formulation "humans and apes had a common ancestor a few million years ago." dodges giving a premature opinion on a hard question.

How you define the word "ape" makes no difference to the facts about our relationships with our ancestors and their other descendants.

More like “any common ancestor of all apes is also an ancestor of all humans”.

(Humans are not apes if you define apes paraphiletically e.g. as ‘the descendants of the most recent common ancestor of bonobos and gibbons, excluding humans’, but then “humans are not apes” becomes a tautology.)

Which of these two views is correct? That strikes me as a very hard question. I'm uncomfortable with the words "humans are still apes" because that phrase seems to be used to beg the question. The more conservative formulation "humans and apes had a common ancestor a few million years ago." dodges giving a premature opinion on a hard question.

Humans might have adaptations which set us apart from all the other apes behavior-wise, but we share a common ancestor with chimps and bonobos more recently than they share a common ancestor with orangutans. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say we split off from the apes millions of years ago, when we're still more closely related to some of the apes than those apes are to other species of ape.

Edit: already pointed out in the grandparent, I guess this is what I get for only looking at the local context.

So when somebody else asks for your help, in the form of charity or taxes, or because they need you to help them move a refrigerator, you can cite all sorts of reasons for not helping ("I think you're lying about needing help" or "I don't care" or "I'm too tied up with my own problems"), but the one thing you can't say is, "Why should you need help? I've never gotten help!" Not unless you're either shamefully oblivious, or a lying asshole.

Why did this quote get down-voted by at least two people? I thought it was much, much better than the other quote I posted this month, which is currently sitting pretty at 32 karma despite not adding anything we didn't already know from the Human's Guide to Words sequence.

Well, it's true and it's false.
It's popular "on" LW in the sense that many of the people here identify as libertarians.
It's not popular "on" LW, in the sense that discussions of libertarianism are mostly unwelcome.
And, yes, the same is true of many other political philosophies.

Is this true? [...] Are there any demographical studies of LW's composition in personspace?

The closest things we have to those are probably the mid-2009 and late 2011 surveys. People could fill in their age, gender, race, profession, a few other things, and...politics!

The politics question had some default categories people could choose: libertarian, liberal, socialist, conservative & Communist. In 2009, 45% ticked the libertarian box, and in 2011, 32% (among the people who gave easy-to-categorize answers). Although those obviously aren't majorities, libertarianism is relatively popular here.

I mean, isn't that universally recognized as a mind killer?, just like most other political philosophies?

Political philosophies are like philosophies in general, I think. However mind-killy they are, a person can't really avoid having one; if they believe they don't have one, they usually have one they just don't know about.

[it's] Strange that tradition should not show more interest in the past.

-- the character Sherkaner Underhill, from A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge.

If people believe traditions are valuable, they should anticipate that searching the past for more traditions is valuable. But we don't see that; we see most past traditions (paradoxically!) rejected with "things are different now".

If people believe traditions are valuable, they should anticipate that searching the past for more traditions is valuable.

This implication is true, but the premise typically is not. The conservative defense of tradition-for-tradition's-sake isn't really a defense of all traditions, it's a defense of long-term-stable, surviving traditions. Don't think, "It's old; revere it." Think, "It's working; don't break it." For traditions which weren't working well enough to be culturally preserved with no searching necessary, this heuristic doesn't apply. To the contrary, if it turned out that there was no correlation between how long a tradition survives and how worthwhile it is, then there would be no point in giving a priori respect to any traditions.

My subjective impression is that people who talk a lot about tradition are more interested in "the past" than they are interested in "history". e.g. the history of our nation does not bear out the traditional idea that everyone is equal. Or for that matter, the tradition of social mobility in our country, or the tradition of a wedding veil, or the tradition of Christmas caroling v. wassailing, etc.

The reality is actually scarier than that if there was a big conspiracy run by an Inner Party of evil but brilliant know-it-alls, like O’Brien in “1984″ or Mustapha Mond in “Brave New World.” The reality is that nobody in charge knows much about what is going on.

For all that it's fun to signal our horror at the ignorance/irrationality/stupidity of those in charge, I still think real-world 2012 Britain, USA, Canada and Australia are all better than Oceania circa 1984. For one thing, people are not very often written out of existence.

The quote states that the current establishment has no idea what's going on. How would they be competent enough in this state to band together, write people out of existence, then keep it a secret indefinitely?

Me: "The BOFH stories are just stories and certainly not role models. Ha! Ha! Baseball bat, please."
Boss: "The DNS stuff is driving me batty, but I'm not sure who needs taking into a small room and battering."
Me: "Your past self."
Boss: "Yeah, he was a right twat."

We have not succeeded in answering all our problems.
The answers we have found only serve
to raise a whole set of new questions.
In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever,
but we believe we are confused on a higher level
and about more important things.

-Posted outside the mathematics reading room, Tromsø University
From the homepage of Kim C. Border

That could just mean we're no good at solving mysteries that involve magic.

Also, I think there is a selection effect in so far as there are solved mysteries where the solution was magic; however, you'd probably argue that they were not solved correctly using no other evidence than that the solutions involved magic.

It depends what you mean by magic. Nowadays we communicate by bouncing invisible light off the sky, which would sure as hell qualify as "magic" to someone six hundred years ago.

The issue is that "magic", in the sense that I take Minchin to be using it, isn't a solution at all. No matter what the explanation is, once you've actually got it, it's not "magic" any more; it's "electrons" or "distortion of spacetime" or "computers" or whatever, the distinction being that we have equations for all of those things.

Take the witch trials, for example - to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were. If they had known how the accused were supposed to be screwing with reality, they wouldn't have called them "witches", but "scientists" or "politicians" or "guys with swords".

Admittedly all of those can have the same blank curiosity-stopping power as "magic" to some people, but "magic" almost always does. Which is why, once you've solved the mystery, it turns out to be Not Magic.

Take the witch trials, for example - to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were.

Consider something like this and notice that our modern "explanations" aren't much better.

And wrong. E.g., the perihelion precession of Mercury turned out to be caused by all matter being able to warp space and time by its very existence. We like to call that Not Magic, but it's magic in the sense of disagreeing with established scientific theory, and in the sense of being something that, if explained to someone who believed in Newtonian physics, would sound like magic.

I wouldn't say it would sound like magic. It would sound weird and inexplicable, but magic doesn't just sound inexplicable, it sounds like reality working in a mentalist, top-down sort of way. It sounds like associative thinking, believing that words or thoughts can act on reality directly, or things behaving in agentlike ways without any apparent mechanism for agency.

Relativity doesn't sound magical; in fact, I'd even say that it sounds antimagical because it runs so counter to our basic intuitions. Quantum entanglement does sound somewhat magical, but it's still well evidenced

Interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Now that I think about it, you're right; most fictional magic does act on things that are fundamental concepts in people's minds, rather than on things that are actually fundamental.

That said, I still say it all sounds like magic. I couldn't tell you exactly what algorithm my brain uses to come up with "sounds like magic", though.

Now that I think about it, you're right; most fictional magic does act on things that are fundamental concepts in people's minds, rather than on things that are actually fundamental.

I didn't just have fictional magic in mind; concepts like sympathetic magic are widespread, maybe even universal in human culture. Humans seem to have strong innate intuitions about the working of magic.

My father was a psychologist and a lifelong student of human behavior, and when I brought him my report card he often used to say: “This tells me something about you, something about your teacher, and something about myself.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that’s all.”

At first when I posted it I think I was thinking of it as kind of endorsing a pragmatic approach to language usage. I mean, it hurts communication to change the meanings of words without telling anyone, but occasionally it might be useful to update meanings when old ones are no longer useful. It used to be that a "computer" was a professional employed to do calculations, then it became a device to do calculations with, now its a device to do all sorts of things with.

But I feel like that's kind of a dodge - you're absolutely right when you say changing the meanings arbitrarily (or possibly to achieve a weird sense of anthropomorphic dominance over it) harms communication, and should be avoided, unless the value of updating the sense of the word outweighs this.

I think the original is instrumentally more useful. On hearing "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", one of my reactions is "I have good intentions, I'd better make sure I'm not on the road to hell". On hearing your version my first reaction is "whew, this doesn't apply to me, only to those people with bad epistemology".

"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)"

There is a spookier possibility. Suppose it is easy to send messages to the past, but that forward causality also holds (i.e. past events determine the future). In one way of reasoning about it, a message sent to the past will "alter" the entire history following its receipt, including the event that sent it, and thus the message itself. Thus altered, the message will change the past in a different way, and so on, until some "equilibrium" is reached--the simplest being the situation where no message at all is sent. Time travel may thus act to erase itself (an idea Larry Niven fans will recognize as "Niven's Law").

Fair point -- I actually wasn't 100% convinced myself it fits here... Reason for posting it anyway was that (a) it somehow reminded me of the omega/2-boxes problem (i.e., the paradoxal way how present and past seem to influence each other), (b) Hans Moravec work touches on so many of the AI/transhumanist themes common in LW and (c) I found it such a clever observation that I thought people here would appreciate.